Though human rights groups had called on Mr. Obama to use his visit to press for change, the president took a mild tone in his public remarks. He gently urged the Ethiopian government to make room for opposition, while stressing his respect for the country and its challenges in emerging from a long era of monarchy and autocracy.

“We are very mindful of Ethiopia’s history, the hardships that this country has gone through,” Mr. Obama said at a joint news conference with Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn. “It has been relatively recently which the Constitution that was formed, and elections put forward a democratically elected government.” He added that “there is still more work to do, and I think the prime minister is the first to acknowledge that there is more work to do.”

The elections in May were condemned by human rights groups as a sham. The government made it hard for opposition candidates to register, raise money and mobilize supporters, according to watchdog groups. Peaceful protesters were denied permits, harassed and in some cases arrested. News organizations were shut down and reporters harassed, threatened or arrested.

Susan Rice, the stooge the Obama administration sent out to five Sunday shows to blame Benghazi on a YouTube video, acknowledged that Ethiopia’s government wasn’t democratically elected.

At the White House the day before the president left for Africa, Rice was asked specifically if she considered the Ethiopian prime minister to be “democratically elected.” She said that the purported 100 percent support that Hailemariam supposedly won suggests “some concern for the integrity of the electoral process — at least if not in the outcomes, then in some of the mechanisms that supported the process, the freedom for the opposition to campaign.”

Pressed to clarify whether she thought that made the prime minister a democratically elected leader, Rice smirked and pointed again to the election results: “100 percent.”

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